Handle With Care
by dialNforNinja
Summary: Stumbling through Surrey on a certain fateful night, a man of the Cloth rescues a baby from abandonment on a doorstep...  surprise crossover   repost now with spelchekkr action!


Note: Opinions expressed in this story are NOT those of the author, only the character.

If you treat things carelessly and leave them lying around, you shouldn't be surprised if someone else picks them up and takes them home. No matter who it is, or what sort of person they turn out to be...

Father Anderson was stumbling along as he made his way through the cold winter night in Surrey, England. If the gossip-starved housewives of the suburban street had seen it, they'd doubtless have been clucking over drink in the Church, but the truth was that he never touched a drop aside from a sip at Communion, for his body was a Temple of God and to defile it with alcohol would be a sacrilege. No, he'd been beset by violence while in the duties of his office, and only now managed to recover enough to regain his feet after being tossed, a blood-soaked mess, in a dumpster earlier that evening. Under the circumstances then, it was perhaps excusable for him to be muttering about Protestants, monsters, and hellfire, and that between that and the lingering pain hadn't noticed the brief blackout that had ended just before he turned fully onto the street.

There are a great many things that can be said about Father Alexander Anderson, Paladin of the Catholic Church, member of the secret Vatican Division XIII, Iscariot. He is a fanatic, he is pathologically hostile to non-Catholics, he possesses an ability to recover from truly terrifying levels of damage - rather than the simple mugging one might expect from his current levels of injury, he had in fact been shot over one hundred times and had every bone in his limbs and most of his ribs broken earlier, and his black clerical outfit was doubly dark and completely stiff with dried blood. Even as he took another step, the shredded skin showing through the tatters where jagged bone had torn out of his lower leg came together and reformed into a whole, and his stride evened out at last.

One thing he was not, however, was a monster.

So, when he heard the restless sounds of a fussy toddler not quite waking up as he tried to roll over in a basket on the step of the house he happened to be passing by, he immediately investigated, and was horrified to discover a child, younger even than the ones at the orphanage where he often spent his down time, abandoned to the elements on such a night. With a sneer and a renewed condemnation of the damned godless Protestants of the Church of England he snatched the child up and clutched him to his chest, kicking the basket aside with barely contained fury. It was all he could do not to storm inside and send the pigs that would commit such an act to the eternity in the Lake of Fire they so richly deserved, but time enough for that later, perhaps, for now he must get the poor boy to shelter. The cold November air was bad enough, but if his opponent happened to come back in search of a rematch...normally, Anderson would welcome the chance for another round with the abomination, but the life and soul of this innocent were in his hands more directly than usual. The blond man undid the clasps of his jacket - riddled with bullet holes and stiff with blood, but otherwise mostly intact - and wrapped it around the boy to better shield him from the wind and share the furnace warmth of the Regenerator's body heat, currently considerably elevated as his supernaturally blessed immune system eliminated contaminants from he many wound he'd borne and tissues reknit at unearthly rates.

There was something else, though, as he strode down the quiet suburban street, legs almost fully recovered after the short pause. Something from teh child in his arms. Something that resonated with the feeling of the holy power that granted him his legendary durability in the servcice of the Lord... it was faint, undeveloped and untrained, but...

This child, surely not more than a year of age, had the potential to become a Regenerator. He was sure of it. Paladin Anderson grinned a shark-toothed grin of anticipation, at the thought of what the two of them could accomplish, once the boy had grown and been trained. Though he was by his own admission a man of direct action and left it to his superiors in the Church to direct his movements and activites outside of battle, he was also quite a bit older than he looked thanks to his holy gifts, and perfectly capable of long-term thought and planning. Yes, this Harry Potter would be raised according to good Catholic principles, (Just as well he'd stayed his hand from carrying out more violent impulses at that doorstep - the letter he'd found while adjusting the boy's blanket indicated he'd been left there without the owners' knowledge. He'd certainly be on the look out for this 'Dumbledore' heathen in the future, however) and when the time came he would become Anderson's disciple in monster hunting.

Reaching the Iscariot safe house on Juniper Parkway at last, he laid the boy down on an overstuffed chair in the sitting room ,then threw back his head and laughed.

* * *

><p>Um, yeh. I honestly have NO idea whatsoever how this could be taken forward - the Catholics are the 'stealth villains' of Hellsing; while the Nazi-remnants of Das Millenium just want to go out with a bang and rid the world of Alucard along the way, with blood spilled on either side mainly counted as a bonus rather than a goal in itself, Iscariot wants slaughter every non-human and non-Catholic in the world, and are proud to announce it whenever confronted. At the same time, they honestly believe that they are heroes, sheltering the souls of the faithful. A Harry raised by them would without question see the existence of a society of witches who openly venerate Merlin and Morgana as anathema to be cleansed with fire, and the only way any HP canon character could be preserved as anything but an opponent would be as an Iscariot agent who'd been gathering information on the Wizarding World in order to make sure it was destroyed root and branch to eliminate the possibility of a return - a Muggleborn is the only option there, which immediately points to Hermione since there's hardly any others who get more than a throw-away mention; just the Creevey brothers, Anthony Goldstein in Ravenclaw, a 'Puff I can't remember the name of, and maybe a couple more. By the sheer nature of the Hellsing world it would almost have to be a Darkfic, even if Harry has enough self-control to be inserted as a similar infiltrator himself at eleven, pretending to go along with the assertion that the ability to cast spells is not inherently diabolic or divine, merely an energy manipulation that most humans are incapable of. Even so, I can't see the ruse lasting long enough to encompass a single actual class...<p>

One of the forum readers (Sweno? Drogan Nitefiler? I can't remember) suggested a less thoroughly indoctrinated Harry and slightly less fanatic Iscariot, who study magic as a potentially usable weapon in their holy work, come down like the flaming sword of god they see themselves as when Voldemerde shows his face, and make efforts to recruit squibs and muggleborn kids to train as more junior Regenerators and really lay the smack down on Hellsing's hell-spawned abomination come the mid-noughties when the timeline catches up to Hellsing canon. Of course, this means either having Alucard show a little more of his hand, powering up Seras in some way (Could she be a fully trained muggleborn who left the magical world due to its bigotry?) or both, or else letting this "kinder, gentler Iscariot" roflstomp the protagonists of their native series and spinning them as the heroes.

This short is open to adoption, if you want to give it a shot just copy this over to your own account when you have a second chapter to add, and drop me a review or PM with the URL so I can enjoy your work.

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